But Down Another Road, the 1969 album by the Graham Collier Sextet, doesn't sound like any of these. And yet you can hear the excitement of discovery; the turbulence of the times; and the dark, dank, grey streets of postwar London.

I discovered it via Stuart Maconie's Freak Zone on BBC 6 Music, but Gilles Peterson had included one track, Lullaby for a Lonely Child, on Impressed, a 2002 compilation that revived interest in British jazz of the 60s.

Collier, the bandleader and bassist, sadly died last year. But drummer John Marshall remembers his part in the birth of British jazz-rock.

"The 60s came late to jazz," he says. "The 60s energy. The 60s in jazz were more like 1965 to 1975. The jazz scene in London was absolutely buzzing. It coincided with a big influx of young musicians coming into London. Ronnie Scott's was the hub. It was like a hothouse. There was a youthful energy, a desire to get away from what had gone before.

"There was a change to the culture in this country – people were very creative and self-confident, and not in the shadow of the States."

Was this because of the success of groups such as the Beatles and the Stones?

"Yes, it was mainly because of the pop music scene, which just exploded. But at the beginning of that, jazz was seen as the enemy."

Marshall explains: "The jazz scene can be extraordinarily conservative, partly because people become very good on their instruments. So if they see someone getting away with it …"

But the British pop explosion provided opportunities for jazz musicians. "There were lots of gigs doing pop covers. They were often very good bands, and I really liked it. I did a long tour with Scott Walker, who had a fantastic band. And he was a very good singer. I also started playing with Jack Bruce. I found playing rock gigs easy, but a lot of people didn't."

Marshall joined Collier's group since 1966, when Collier returned from Boston, where he'd been the first Briton to graduate from the jazz course at the Berklee College of Music: "I felt immediately at home, because the music had that Charlie Mingus influence. It was not the normal jazz writing, it wasn't so bebop oriented. It was more open and varied.

"I'd done a lot of shows that involved reading music. You had an overall structure, but you'd have a lot of choices inside it. There was a lot of quite conventional writing for jazz, with a theme and then a series of solos. But Graham's philosophy was, how to find a role for the composer in improvising music. His structures were ways around solving that problem. Things were very fluid within these structures."

What does he remember about the recording of Down Another Road?

"Not much! There was a Saturday evening session, and then all day Sunday."

I express astonishment at the speed at which the album was recorded. "That wasn't unusual for a jazz album," says Marshall. "It's partly economical, though back then the music scene was so big, there was room for a lot more things. And record companies were willing to finance it."

On one track, The Barley Mow, Marshall played wind chimes: "I've still got them, actually! It was to get away from the conventional way of doing things – a jazz drummer would usually use brushes on a ballad."

He says the Down Another Road sessions reflected the live sound of the Graham Collier Sextet at that time. "We played live in the studio. We didn't think about using the studio in the way that rock people had been doing."

Lullaby for a Lonely Child was written by Karl Jenkins, who played piano, oboe and also soprano and baritone sax in the Sextet. "Graham was always on the lookout for new musicians. I think he found Karl in Barry, at the Jazz Summer School there. He had an ear for very good players."

Not long after Down Another Road, Marshall played with Jenkins in another group, Ian Carr's Nucleus. "There aren't many people who can play the oboe like that. He was going outside the range of the instrument. It was very expressive playing, for an oboe."

Although the influence of the free jazz of America – of Ornette Coleman or John Coltrane – can be heard on Down Another Road, it sounds as though it could only have been made in London, and only at that time. What was it that made it sound so rooted to a specific time and place?

"A lot of Graham's music has that minor-key feel. It's just Graham. But it is typical of that time, when there were changes in the way people played, and changes in the material. There was a rock feel, and also completely free playing. They were the main characteristics of people's playing at that time. Graham was open to those sorts of things."

In the US, Miles Davis was bringing in elements of rock music. How did rock styles affect British jazz?

"If you change to a rock feel, time signatures such as five or seven become more logical," says Marshall, "because rock is based on repetitive patterns. On the track Down Another Road, the time signature changes with the chord changes – it becomes coherent."

How does Down Another Road sound to him now? "In jazz, people do things, then move on. But people are rediscovering a lot of music made at that time. What I hear when I listen now, many years later, is the music we played, rather than how it fell short of what I would have liked."